Not Out of the Woods Yet?

Booman Tribune has this video of a Sarah Palin rally that will make you want to throw up.

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Does it mean Obama isn't out of the woods yet? I don't think so. There are more of us than them. The radical right fringe exist but not in enough numbers to take over our Government -- if all of us get out and vote.

It's a good reminder though that we can't take anything for granted and everyone has to get out and vote -- early if possible, to avoid the chance something will go awry at your polling station.

How sad that we have to get it from Al jazeera, but then again they've done a lot of good reports that other news agencies miss or choose to miss. The environment I live in right now is very similar, I hear similar things everyday. Having a black president will change many things long overdue for change. It is sad how far the fear mongerers get here in influencing attitudes. I was worried about Obama's affiliation with Wright's church for awhile but that seems to be a closed chapter and Wright's antiwhite rhetoric does not seem to be a part of Obama's belief system. As for the Obama supporter on the street, he is inviting all sorts of discourse and he is in a position to hear some scary stuff but I don't intend to allow the scary stuff to rule me. Having our first black president will lay to rest a lot more of the fear that belongs to my country. Once again many will learn we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

And I think the same goes for some liberals. I imagine every group has it's lunatic fringe. But if you keep the focus on these loons, it motivates your own base base in response. So each side stirs up their base by showcasing the other side's nutters. Welcome to politics, I guess...

and everyone of them that booed HRC's name at Obama rallies was a dupa head also. Let's move away from generalizing the crackpots and focus on "Freddie Mae", transplants and making sure we remove those silly restrictions like teacher certifications.

but we are coming to a grinding halt. I really thought we would get hit much earlier but have been lucky to say the least. I am anticipating no revenue in November and December and most likely Jan as well based on what clients are telling me. We have enough reserve to make it a year without any new work but I sure as hell hope it is not that long. Good news is I am working out like a madman and getting a chance to take the kids to the Y for swimming lessons and general play time. They love a slow economy!

I expect the first three months of 2009 that I will take none either. I am hoping that in April it will pick up some but until I see a commitment to create jobs from the fed, I cannot imagine those of us in service based businesses have much to look forward to. I hope you are spending quality time with the children while you have the chance and that it is doesn't strain either of us to the point of choking. I bought a building that I was going to house our office in and have been rehabbing it a piece at a time (we also have two non-profits who want to move in with us) but of course now I cannot spend a dime on rehab because I have to protect our capital.

A sour economy kills left and right small biz and truthfully I was fully ready to vote for McCain if he had a better plan for the economy. Social issues aside, I cannot imagine going two years at the past two months revenue pace and keeping the biz alive.

It isn't lost on me that racial slurs and violent rhetoric at Palin rallies have already evoked a backlash, whereas democrats and progressives tolerated the Hillary nutcracker and Olbermann's eliminationist imaginings without so much as a shudder.

for standing up for civil rights for minorities almost as much as they hate the minorities themselves. The Republicans have used this hatred as a weapon for a long time. I hope that after a year or so, when these people see that none of the ridiculous things they fear come true, maybe at least some of them will change their minds. I think that is what the right fears most about Obama - they will lose the racial fear weapon.

Don't stereotype Southerners. While the vestiges remain, there is some pretty vile racism in northern and western states too. It's convenient to point a finger at southerners to absolve our neighbors but it's not accurate.

I was looking at a list of African American governors and senators and only found three out of 150. One is about to go to the white house and one is in office because his predecessor couldn't keep his pants zipped. Not a great record.

I didn't mean to categorize the entire population in such a manner. I'm sorry if you felt I was pointing at you. I am not. Where I live Obama support is silent though. It is very tense here today. I was gone for the weekend and went shopping yesterday for the bare frig after getting home. I am fine with people expressing their political views but even at the grocery store yesterday I was asked if I knew that Obama was a Muslim and one person in the checkout line even told me he was born in Iraq. Even if these things were facts they mean nothing shameful singularly to me but they seemed to mean something shameful to other people in the store line. They aren't even facts though, they are total fiction and why would so many people where I live want to believe absolute fictions. I don't live around stupid people. They must WANT to believe certain things in order to justify something. Wish I knew what it was. I did tell everyone in line that those "facts" were fiction but said nothing else. I'm not looking for a fight and I didn't even enter the store to announce my beliefs. Just didn't feel like I could let flat out untruths rule the space I inhabit. Where I live though things are getting really scary sometimes. Why is that?

in the South is not like this and you can really find it anywhere you go. I have seen it all over the US, (we have lived in all sections of the US) Perhaps it is just exaggerated where you are, around Columbus and Phenix City, Ala., if I am not mistaken. George Wallace was from Barbour Coounty which is close as well.

My daughter is the same way you are, she is a tiny lil thing and most dont believe she is grown, much less the mother of teenagers and when she speaks up about things like you did in line, everyone looks so shocked. It's really funny, but they listen to her. I have a great admiration for her and her strong independent mind.

Will do this country so much good, just in terms of showing people that there there is no difference outside of a little melanin. Granted there will always be people that 1)want to divide us or 2)need to feel better about themselves through hating another, but that group will hopefully be made more a fringe element of our society.

I really hope that an Obama presidency can give us a new civil rights discussion that moves it much farther past race and into discussions of gender, sexuality and most importantly class.

civil rights for gay citizens. Oppressed people can't demand their own rights as effectively as the rest of society can. Until mainstream, straight American demands equality, gay rights will continue to be a wedge issue that facilitates right wing politics.

Bill Clinton promised change, then caved. Obama hasn't promised it, but he should deliver it simply because it's the right thing to do and because equality would mitigate their wedge rhetoric.

Having Obama elected, or anyone outside of the mainstream ideal, allows people to see the "normalness" of a group, person or idea.

We see this with the courts allowing gays to marry in california ahead of the Prop 8 vote. Californias are able to see that allowing gays to marry changes nothing except that some gays are married. Once something stops being hypothetical, and it shows that the hypothetical is benign, the rights fear arguments lose much of their strength.

"Anybody who's considering not voting for Sen. Obama because he's black or for Sen. Clinton because she's a woman, I don't want their vote,"

-CNN/Youtube debate in July.

I hope the lunatics in the video posted are simply fringe. But it makes me mad that McCain hasn't called out the racists among his supporters as Edwards did above. If you seem to be condoning racist feelings...the last thing we need is for these idiotic nuts to feel that their racist views are legitimated by a major political party.

These folks will become unhinged when/if Obama wins. It doesn't matter if its a 350+ electoral vote win, with a 10 point spread, it'll have been "stolen".

The media will give these goofballs a platform to spew this nonsense too. They've already telegraphed the line of attack and the media's willingess to go along with it by playing up the ACORN absurdities.

A potential Obama victory is just the begining of the ugliness to come from folks like this, not the end.

to be in the video, but I'm more concerned about Palin/McCain supporters who are good folks who've been misled. People are naturally afraid of those who are different from them, and our side doesn't always make it easy for our opponents to see our point of view. Outright racism aside, some of the comments in the video speak to ongoing racial concerns that lefties tend to overlook. For instance, one woman said, "Obama and his wife, I'm concerned that they could be anti-white, that he might hide that." Well, given what they've seen in the media and the right wing obsession with his pastor's anti-white rants, I expect there are many white citizens who have considered the possibility that our first black president might support policies that promote one ethnic group over another. I don't think Obama would, but let's face it, we already have government funded programs that target specific ethnicities. In Hawaii, millions of dollars are spent every year on programs that can only be utilized by Kanaka maoli. While helpful in concept, those programs can create even more racial conflict. Joe Whiteguy sees his Hawaiian neighbor in the same income bracket as him, driving an new SUV, sporting a big screen TV, yet somehow eligible for all sorts of programs over the years that could have been based on economic need instead of ethnicity. Those programs range from assistance purchasing property to special help in school and free college education for his kids, even an extra year of medical school to prepare you for the (free to one ethnic group) med school degree at UH... and Joe's taxes are used to support these and thousands more ethic-based programs.

I think our liberal white guilt prevents many lefties from questioning these programs, and the result is an increase in racial conflict that facilitates right wing political power. We may not be able to convince outright racists that Obama's not secretly anti-white, but there are still a heck of a lot of good people who are obviously concerned and fearful for their own futures, and they're basing their opinions on what they see and hear, and how our government currently operates. I expect that many Palin/McCain supporters aren't racist themselves, but their concerns are valid and if we don't pay attention to them, we've lost them. We need those voters on board to succeed in rescuing our country from the mess we're in. We can't just beat them and move on because the right wing will suck them back in with tissues and open arms. We can help them understand the election is less about race than it is about Republican policies that destroy our country, because that's where we find common ground. Please see my other post today on this concept of connecting on our shared values instead of just blowing them off.

affirmative action, already under attack before this -- and watch what will come when we have a black president.

It was designed by wonderfully well-meaning people who equated race and class, rather than seeing the correlations that are not always causations anymore. So we do see, at campuses, kids who went to great burban schools, kids of two Ph.D.s who benefited from affirmative action -- and incredible hard work -- but whose kids are still getting help that can mean less funding for others who may really need it. I taught a kid whose mother remarried when he was 18; she married a Hispanic guy who adopted the kid, who suddenly became a minority overnight. His heritage was entirely German. :-)

Obama has addressed this a bit. I think he sees the problems. He can take leadership on this to fix it -- to face the realities of class in this country, to use economic solutions for economic problems . . . which then can help societal problems. And then we can save affirmative action, as without it, we will take steps back at a time of economic chaos that will hurt the poor and working class (of any color) the most.

this but it should be pointed out that there are those who are voting for Obama simply because he is not white. Racism, sexism, and many other -isms lurk in both parties. When they are shown for what they are its ugly and repulsive, but it will always be there no matter how open either party thinks it is.

is causing the unspoken to be outspoken. It's time for this debate. It is time to have this discourse or we wouldn't be here. America gets the opportunity to grow up in this department. It is a good day.

My brother was at a Home Depot earlier this week in Northern Michigan...He has a 'Firefighters for Obama/Biden' decal on his SUV...A man walked past him while he was loading his purchase and called him a N-word Lover. He's still apoplectic over it......

who adores murdering doctors willing to provide abortion services and you begin to wonder. I intend to walk gently around here and speak goodwill to all no matter what comes down the pike here. Some things in some areas could get dicey and hope everyone remembers to be safe first. I think Obama is our next president and I trust the competency of the Secret Service. Some people have very strong racist feelings though and I'm living in the Belt Buckle and I remain aware of that every day. I caught myself last night though at dinner with conservative Christians friends talking about Christ and his teachings. It changed the air around me and I really wasn't looking for a way to win an argument or anything like that. I was only attempting to reach them and express my feelings and how incongruent I was finding them in their beliefs. I thought I had sworn off ever saying anything about Christ after living here but apparently not :)

eight years in hell was in Crawford when a twenty something counter protester showed up to shame me. We were getting our first press reports of military short handedness then too. I asked him where his uniform was and he told me if they needed him he would go. That just set me off with a case of violent mouth, things got loud and spit flecked. The Vietnam vets came and led me away, my mouth was still moving though.

I think these laws will go down the way gay-marriage is happening, except without the accompanying backlash. No one on the federal stage is going to make this a priority right now. But it's on the ballot to decriminilize posession in my state, and it has already been decriminilized in NY, and a few others.

Local laws are easier to change, and are for the most part more impactful. Once more states get on board, then there will be more pressure on the feds to stop raids too.

Although if you look more closely it's still pretty bad. If you have it "in public view" you are still screwed. Still, I have at least one friend who would've been saved a trip to a cell if they were in NY instead of PA. Still, CA is probably a better comparison.

is how they musta got me, both my brothers, and half my friends....not a one had more than 25g. My last arrest I had approx 0.001 g, otherwise known as a roach....more burnt paper than reefer. I was sitting, chained to a bench, in utter disbelief.

No I had my facts a little wrong, and took the newspapers at their word. I do know one person who was illegally searched and went to jail for the night in PA and may have gotten off in NY - but it's still a pretty terrible law.

I have never been arrested. But I was there that night and somewhat responsible for the person who was, I feel your anger. The cops seemed stunned when lawyers got called and people were sticking up for the guy. It definitely seemed like a case of racial profiling (based on the fact that only ONE person was arrested) - and the cops were not expecting him to be well educated and connected.

I can believe people will swallow Palin and vote Repub., but how can the actually rally and support such an obvious cyborg? Check out http://mypalininterview.com/ for a direct link into her brain, and ask here questions and listen to the stuff she comes up with - plus, the south park style animation is killer.

lead to a genuine discussion of often-veiled racism etc, but I won't hold my breath. There's a good chance that the backlash will foment another Republican Revolution, whether based explicitly on race or not. As soon as the hysterical conservatives find their feet, they'll go about their hateful work just as they did when Clinton stunned them in '92. But this time they won't just be fighting a white Southerner of modest background -- they'll have more to rally their base around.

I'm hoping for the best and will work for it too, but a country that re-elected Bush will be slow to change. Also, for what it's worth, I think we need not only a black President, but also some powerful non-political leaders.

Will there be riots. Will the threat to Obama go up through out his presidency. There is still a whole lot of blatant racism in America. It use to be openly displayed but the civil right bill stopped plenty of that but that does not mean it still not out there.

As I was growing up I saw plenty of it. Signs on buses that said Colored People To The Back of Bus, Segregated drinking fountains, Blacks not allowed in many southern schools etc etc.

I remember a sign a trucker told me about as he traveled through out the states. He told me there was a billboard sign in Alabama that said the following:

The blackest land the whitest people. N####er don't let the sun set on you in this town.

I can't believe that I was living through those times and moreover that many of that stuff still exist.

working class enclave in liberal Queens NY where I grew up(diverse area now), the black folks used to run from the factories (those are gone now) to the bus stop to get outta town before dark...this was the early 80's. The first few black families to move in had it pretty rough.

By the late 80's, early 90's the factories were gone, the neighborhood became diverse, and the problem went away.

Just a little perspective...it ain't just the South that was/is pretty f*cked up.

is a title of a good new book on this long-ignored phenomenon of the North -- I read it this summer after a tip here or on some blog or other. The book even has photos of signs that used to be outside those towns, telling workers of color (and at times immigrants and others) to get out of town by sundown. Thousands of towns across the country with the Great Migration.

A great work of research that I hope will be brought into a lot of American history textbooks. Its already added into my lectures this year. Btw, I grew up in a burb like that, too, if not officially so -- except for the upscale subdivision where, as was common elsewhere then as well, where every property title included a clause barring resale to quite a list of undesirables.

Those clauses were legal until 1968. Only 40 years ago. Some people who bought homes there before the fair housing laws still are there. Change is slow, as we can see.

Sundown towns - one of the major reasons so many minorities live in cities in the north. Power in numbers. Most of the former slaves who migrated north were traditionally rural people who had no choice but to move to the city since they were run out of all the smaller towns. One of the reasons Chicago is such a hot-bed for minority politicians is that in Illinois they literally had no-where else to go.

was more the later Great Migration, WWI on. How great that some of this is getting into classes, as it's still not in standard survey texts (I've looked at a lot lately).

The first did have somewhere else to go, and many went to rural areas -- they were farmers, after all -- as fugitive slaves and freedwomen and men had done before them. The Sundown Towns book shows, though, that many were run out of sundown towns from about the 1890s on and had to move to cities, where later migrants joined them.

We still have photos in my state of an integrated school in the 19th century in a rural area where generations lived in peace until the last descendants of founding families died not long ago; many of its buildings now are a state historical site. Other such rural crossroads still have some descendants in those areas here, too -- some brought north by units that freed them in the Civil War, some that came north on their own in the late 1800s, if they were among the few who came north of Chicago.

But yes, the list of sundown towns in Illinois and Indiana, especially near the Mason-Dixon line, is stunning. On the other hand, that's where the Underground Railroad was at its most active, as new research now is helping us to realize (and that the UGRR was begun by African Americans later assisted by whites). Even there, some rural areas and small towns withstood the early 20th-century tide of reaction -- there is fascinating new research on New Albany, Indiana, across the Mason-Dixon line (aka across the river) from Louisville.

For example, since good ol' Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois figured out how to factor de facto slavery into their state constitutions with "servitude" of 99 years! . . . some freedwomen and men there figured out how to get around that and bought their family members still in the South as "servants," as is evident in records of a rare antislavery judge there, records found in a dusty book in a corner of the courthouse only a few years ago. And some of their descendants still are there, as are others across rural areas in the lower Midwest. How they survived the sundown era are stories that still need to be told. Amazing people.

in 1890s, per some studies -- that was owing to the "push" factor of Southern Jim Crow laws, rise in lynchings and rapes, etc.. WWI saw the "pull" factor, with Northern factories needing workers (as many men went to war, immigration declined, etc.) and recruiting in the South -- sending agents south, advertising in the Defender and other AA papers, etc. Half a million came north from 1916 to 1919 alone, and another 1.5 million in the '20s, as I recall the stats-- and that was just AAs; more Southern whites came north (to Detroit auto factories, for example) then and since. Of course, few came north for work during the Depression -- and then came the next great "pull" factor with WWII; those numbers don't come to me now, but they're easily found online.

But north of Chicago, in cities like mine, ours was a "late Great Migration" with the greatest numbers were into the 1970s -- so we deal with a lot of the adjustments of agricultural life to city life still (in the 1990s, my city led the country in teen motherhood, larger families, and other factors that decline among all groups only after a generation or so of urban life). And farther north in the Twin Cities, it came even later and was much lesser; only recently has it started, as Clinton used to say, to look like America.